whoever designed this database, slap him and don't ever let him near the code again -- I hope it wasn't you?

Sh*t like this is exactly why people preach normalization, but obviously some "developers" still have never heard of it.

OK, so you have a bunch of crap data which looks like JSON. So what you'll have to do is take a JSON parser (if my guess was right) and read out the pieces you want to fetch -- in the hopes that the string isn't broken.

If you have any chance to repair the database, that's actually the first thing you should do.

Do not fumble with home-made regexes. That just makes everything even crappier.